


Dalek Free Spirit

by circular time (auronlu)



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Clones, Evil Twins (kinda), Gen, Sequel, Spoilers, all the plot that my PWPs weren't using, canon platonic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-10-24 16:35:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10745589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auronlu/pseuds/circular%20time
Summary: The real Nyssa is irretrievably lost, probably dead, beyond the Doctor's reach forever. Still blaming himself for her fate, he learns that she was once cloned, memories and all, when they were taken prisoner on Mojox. The catch: it's a Dalek duplicate. Should he rescue her doppelgänger, or destroy it?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for _Dalek Soul_ and _Entropy Plague_. As usual, I provide all the context needed to understand what's going on if you haven't heard those audios, but holy Aggedor you need to hear _Dalek Soul_.

Such and so finely bolted didst thou seem:  
And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,  
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued  
With some suspicion. I will weep for thee;  
For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like  
Another fall of man. _~_ Shakespeare, _Henry V_

 

“A _week!_ I thought you said this was a hospital ship, not some frontier apothecary’s hut!” Turlough’s brows bristled like backfires. His pale eyes were even more startling than usual, picking up the periwinkle blue of his hospital gown.

The Doctor patted the young man’s arm in awkward sympathy. “Bone regrowth in the foot is a delicate process. There’s so many ligaments and small bones that could fuse incorrectly. But don’t worry.You’ll be as good as new with Dr. Kadowaki overseeing the process.” He flashed a wry smile. “I do wish my companions’ ankles were more durable.”

“Durable? I’m lucky the brute didn’t break every bone in my body while it was chasing me. A fine epitaph that would look on my funeral urn: _Trampled to death by a pygmy mammoth_. Although how anyone could name something that size _pygmy_ I’ll never know. Humans!”

“Well, relatively speaking, it was a very small mammoth,” the Doctor pointed out. “Island populations tend towards dwarfism.”

“And your ‘perfect spots for painting’ tend towards hazard of life and limb. When you said you were taking me to the wellspring of California Impressionism, I was expecting sun, palm trees and beaches, not the Ice Age.”

The Doctor did not trouble to correct him. He had not expected to find a lonely mammoth on Catalina as late as 8000 BC, but then, the Wrangel Island herd had survived off the coast of Siberia right into the Minoan period. Even in the 21st century, there had still been enough frozen carcasses lying about for well-meaning scientists with confused priorities to clone and release them into the wild just after the Arctic Circle thawed.

So much for paradise. They would have to try again after Turlough’s ankle had healed. The Canary Islands, perhaps?

Setting aside the remains of a mediocre tea, the Doctor pushed back his chair. “Well, if you’re settled in, I’d better go check on the time rotor. It was scraping when we landed. Collision with a panicky pachyderm may have jarred it out of alignment.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Would you like me to bring you anything?”

“Some peace and quiet,” Turlough grumbled, “which is not to be found aboard the TARDIS.”

* * *

Humming to himself, the Doctor was taking the ship out for a quick spin to see whether he’d eliminated the squeak in the rotor’s downward motion. A light on the communications panel began to flash. Probably just a glitch to add to the ever-growing repairs list. Even so, any signal strong enough to maintain coherence in the temporal vortex was worthy of attention. Especially when it was a choice between scientific investigation, proceeding to the next item on the repairs checklist, or returning to a hospital that served no tea but Tetley. He hurried around to the communications panel and flipped a switch.

A shrill voice made him reel back from the console in shock, not so much from its volume as from its wrenching familiarity. “ _LEFT POCKET!”_ came the cryptic cry.

“Nyssa?!” He had never expected to hear her voice again. Although considering the way their timelines kept crossing and tangling with one another like vintage phone flexes, he should hardly have been surprised.

“ _Get in!”_ Her rising note of panic was difficult to block out. He felt a mad impulse to throw open the doors in case she was stranded outside.

Instead, he reached for the switch to respond. “Who is this? If this is some kind of joke, it’s in remarkably poor taste.”

“ _LEFT POCKET!_ ”

The random outburst would have seemed like mere nonsense, did he not know its context. Nightmare memories flicked past: Nyssa’s wrist bleeding from the bite of the manacles where she had wriggled her hand free, the _crack!_ of the straps springing back from his chest, the desperate dash back to the TARDIS, the frantic scramble for a misplaced key, and the howl of Dalek guns erupting on all sides as he threw her bodily through the doors.

_“Get in!”_

He gritted his teeth. The recording was repeating itself. To amplify its obscurity, someone had erased all traces of the Daleks and his replies, transforming a moment of terror into banal absurdity. Whatever it meant, it was intolerable. He stretched out his hand to kill the signal. Just then, the looping audio stopped, to be replaced by the gruff tones of an old man.

“Wait— don’t speak yet.” The voice was a stranger’s. “Hear me out. Our mutual acquaintances may be listening. So first, if you wouldn’t mind, tell me what was in your left pocket.”

Seething, the Doctor hesitated with his thumb over the “End” button. The caller sounded humanoid, but that was hardly a bona fide. How could anyone but a Dalek agent have access to that security footage? How had the stranger managed to reach out to a specific TARDIS in the time vortex and establish two-way communications in relative realtime? Only a limited number of spacefaring races had that capability, and the Daleks were one of them. What would happen if the Doctor confirmed his identity, which was apparently the question’s intent? And how _dare_ someone use Nyssa’s voice for a simple identity check? Too many questions. Yet the veiled warning about “mutual acquaintances” suggested that the Doctor was not the only one worried about a Dalek trap.

He needed answers. “A key.”

“Very good. Now, listen closely. You know who that was, and you know where it happened. That was some years ago. _They_ are gone. With her help, we drove them off. But she was the last casualty. I could do no more than keep her in cryostasis—”

“That’s less than six impossible things, but I’ve already had breakfast,” the Doctor broke in.

“ _Quiet_. I am an old man now, and I fear what will happen to her when I’m gone. I had hoped to rehabilitate her without troubling you, but we lack her expertise. You are her only hope. For her sake, I must ask you to come.”

The indicator light blinked out before he could reply. The Doctor slammed his fist on the console beside it.

Deep breaths. Nyssa— Nyssa, whose distorted parting words had crackled from that same communications panel— was almost certainly dead. Yet death, like time, was relative. Once upon a time, she had said goodbye to her TARDIS traveling companions and stayed behind on Terminus. By chance they had found her again, fifty years later in her own relative timeline, out on the galactic frontier searching for clues to cure another plague. There she had made the fatal mistake of accepting a lift home. Best not to dwell on how she had left them. The point was, before their reunion on Helheim, her career as an epidemiologist could have taken her almost anywhere, including… what was it the Daleks had called their base? Mojox. It was not as if she would recognise the place, since the Daleks had transported their prisoners there while unconscious.

Unless—

He had not actually seen the moment of Nyssa’s death. So long as he did not know for certain, he refused to rule out her dogged stubbornness. Had she beaten the odds, then found her way back into normal space like Romana? There was always a chance, albeit an astronomically slim one.

Either way, his choice was clear. He must act upon the message just as if it were genuine. _For her sake,_ he must confront the hateful possibility that he had mistaken a Dalek base in deep space for a Dalek outpost on an occupied planet. If that were true, and Nyssa had somehow found her way back there, no army of Daleks would stop her from trying to help the natives throw off their enslavement. That was the devil of it: the story was perfectly crafted to arouse his protectiveness and his guilt.

“Very well,” he said, addressing the mute walls of his ship. “Let’s get to work. We may as well know the worst at once.” He began to key in a Fourier analysis.

Twenty minutes later, he had his answer. As expected, the message had arrived via Dalek carrier wave. The signal’s exact source was impossible to pinpoint, but standard deviation placed it well within the neighborhood of Mojox, whose location he retrieved from the archives of the TARDIS flight log.

Mindful of other duties of care, he opened a channel to the hospital ship.

* * *

“Doctor, are you _mad?_ You said it yourself: Mojox is a Dalek installation. Of course it’s a trap!”

The Doctor was pacing beside the console. “Be that as it may, I owe it to Nyssa to—”

“Nyssa’s dead, Doctor!”

“ _Thank_ you, Turlough.” He frowned at the speaker grill. “I’ll program the TARDIS to return to you via the Fast Return Switch. If all goes well, I’ll contact you, and you can bring her back to me in the same way. If you don’t hear from me within two weeks, transmit a message to Gallifrey that I may be compromised. They’ll see to it that you’re settled in a time and place of your choosing.”

“Doctor, wait!” Turlough’s voice subsided to a grudging mutter. “You’ll need backup.”

The Doctor hesitated, although there was no question of bringing a companion with him this time. Beneath his cynical, selfish exterior, Turlough was a fundamentally decent person overwhelmed by fears, indicative of some deep trauma that the Doctor had never pressed him about. Despite his handicap, the boy usually managed to master his cowardice when it mattered, which in itself was a special form of courage. The Doctor’s voice softened. “I appreciate the offer, but this is my responsibility. Rest. Heal. Try not to worry. Remember, I’ve been battling Daleks for centuries.”

“But never alone,” Turlough insisted, voice cracking. “You’re leaving me behind because you still don’t trust me like you did Tegan.”

“I wouldn’t take her into a Dalek base either, not after what happened last time.” At least Tegan had survived, but her tearful farewell had forced the Doctor to reexamine how much horror his companions could take. Whence the recent string of resort towns and artistically inspiring landscapes.

“But Doctor, I’m _not_ Tegan. I understand the necessities of war. And I know something about infiltration.” That last was a bleak admission, a clue to whatever past Turlough was fleeing.

“If I didn’t trust you, Turlough, I wouldn’t be sending you my ship.”

It was not quite the truth, or at least not the whole truth. The Doctor could never forget Turlough’s part in trapping Nyssa in yet another time loop, this one walling her off from her own family. It was not Turlough’s fault that an enemy had diverted the TARDIS to a place and time where Nyssa’s son was working twenty-five years after she had set out for Helheim on a routine scouting mission. But Turlough had ensured that mother and son met face to face. After that, history was sealed. Once Nyssa had learned that she never returned home, then she _could_ not return, not without creating a paradox. Possibly the time loop had been irrevocable from the moment the TARDIS touched down. But Nyssa would not have gone on her last journey burdened by fresh heartbreak, if not for Turlough’s indiscretion.

Time loops and crossed timelines: such tragedies were why Time Lords were required to steer clear of them. If the Nyssa in this transmission was Nyssa in the fifty-year gap between Terminus and Helheim, then the Doctor would have to act with the utmost discretion to conceal what he knew of her future. Turlough had already proved untrustworthy with just that kind of secret. Anyway, this was Time Lords’ work. Quite apart from personal considerations, the Doctor was embarking on a _de facto_ CIA mission, protecting the integrity of the timeline by ensuring Nyssa’s survival until her appointment with fate.

While he mulled all this over, Turlough was evidently doing the same. “If you’re that worried about being compromised,” he said, “then how can I know whether it’s safe to fly the TARDIS back to you when you call?”

“We’ll just have to trust your finely-honed skills of self-preservation. Use your judgment.”

“Wonderful.” Turlough sighed. “Good luck, Doctor.”

“Thank you. We’ll talk again soon.” He closed the link and leaned heavily on the edge of the console, staring at his hands.

Ever since he had been the Watcher, Nyssa and he had been meeting one another in the wrong chronological order. It was becoming harder to face her each time. Truth be told, it was not Turlough at the most risk of blurting out something she ought not to hear. _When you encounter us on Helheim, don’t let me put off taking you home. Go straight back to your family. Cure the Richter’s plague. Save lives. For you, these things are more important than all of time and space._

He could not change the past, nor could he alter her future. He’d be damned before he let the Daleks destroy the middle of her life, too.

* * *

“He’s coming, then?” The woman’s voice boomed hollowly in that vast empty space.

“I think so.” Step by halting step, the old man led the way across the pitted floor. “It was almost too easy, Vanth. Maddening, considering how much we needed the Doctor back then.”

“Hardly easy,” the woman said. “How long have you been trying to reach him? And more to the point, who else heard you?”

“Your mother worried the same thing,” he said, gruff voice softening. “But the Daleks never knew I was using their channels, hacking right into heart of their installation, whispering into just the right ear. So we prevailed. Thanks to our friend here.” He halted before a shadowed column, its dull glassy surface grimed by a dark patina.

“This one isn’t anyone’s friend.” The woman wrinkled her nose in that cold, reverent silence. “I still say burn the lot of them.”

“It has been tried,” he pointed out.

The cavernous warehouse of Containment Store A bore mute testimony to his words. Its plasteel walls were blackened, ceiling beams buckled in several places. Amidst the debris stood the melted husks of four Daleks, stripped of their appendages. Most of the half-dome nodules had popped from their casings and lay scattered across the floor like so many pieces of crockery. Some of the cryo tubes along the back wall were open and empty. The remainder were coated in black layers of carbonised plastic, all that remained of the sheeting that had once concealed them. Even so, peeping through coatings of dust and soot and burnt polymers, blue status lights gleamed dully along the sides of several tubes. A dusty computer terminal, repaired or installed since the conflagration, stood on a podium at one end of the row.

“Not with sufficient explosives,” she said. “Did you tell him how many are left?”

“No.” The old man sighed. “One problem at a time.”

“Because he’d give you the same advice as I?”

“No.” Toru rested a hand against the cold glass of the cryo tube he had addressed first. “Because I’m afraid he won’t.”

* * *

“Goodbye, old girl.”

The Doctor watched as the lines of his ship faded from view with a _boom_ and scraping wail that faded mournfully to silence. He was reminded of those bold pioneers of planetary exploration, setting down in ships designed for a one-way journey, with no way to escape a planet’s gravity well unless they could utilise its resources for fuel. He might never see her again, not unless he could find a functional Dalek communications relay with no functioning Daleks defending it. But that was a problem for later.

Turning away, he strode off briskly towards a distant dome peeping up over the knees of the mountain where he had landed. There was no point in charging straight into the lion’s den without scouting a bit first. Behind him on the far side of the mountain lay the Dalek base where he and Nyssa had once been imprisoned. Ahead, nestled at the bottom of an alpine valley, lay the largest nearby settlement. Scanner readings had suggested a concentration of people, the kind with two legs and no metal casings. There was no guarantee that his mysterious contact was among them, but it was a place to start.

The frost of his own breath tickled his cheeks as he strode purposefully down the slope. At another time he might have admired the stark beauty of this frigid landscape, dark forests hugging the steep slopes of river-cut front ranges tumbling down towards an unseen ocean. Low clouds and fog draped distances in sombre greys. Trees bristled with evergreen leaves that gleamed wetly above and dripped down below into long, furry icicles coated with hoarfrost. Trunks and branches were stout and arched to bear the weight. Curiously, although permafrost crunched under his shoes, there were soft patches of ground near bushes and roots, making for slippery footing. Despite himself, his curiosity was piqued. He brushed the holly-like leaves of a shrub in passing. It was warm to the touch, or at least lukewarm.

“Endothermic plants,” he said aloud. “Fascinating. Natural antifreeze.” They must be making highly efficient use of photosynthesis, or else supplementing their energy needs with chemosynthesis from the soil. Just the sort of thing Nyssa would have delighted in.

His pace quickened as the bubbles of smaller domes began to rise above the treetops. So far, there had been no sign of enemy occupation, present or past. The folded landscape around him aroused his faint grudging respect for the Daleks: it was not the sort of terrain they could conquer easily.

As if in answer to his thoughts, a whining hum cut through the fog overhead. He ducked down quickly under tree branches. His cream-coloured coat was not doing much for him in the cold, but at least it blended in with the landscape. Peering out between beards of hanging frost, he spotted a small flyer descending towards the settlement beyond the trees. The craft’s configuration was more kite-shaped than saucer, but the whine of its engines prickled the hair on the nape of his neck.

“I know that sound,” he muttered.

But of course, even when natives threw off the yoke of conquerers, they retained some of the byproducts as well as the scars of occupation. He must hope for the best, and tread warily.

Half an hour’s walking brought him to a mountain path leading down into the city outskirts, for relative definitions of “city” and “outskirts.” The anthill settlement was built partly into the slopes of a river valley, whose plunging cliffs reminded him of Norwegian fjords. Natural terraces bore clusters of outbuildings or small agricultural plots, most capped by thermal domes. The steaming river and its falls, what he could see of them, were netted with numerous weirs, catch-basins, and waterworks. There were trees growing right down into the water, tall pillars reaching up that in many cases had been incorporated into human structures.

While he was scanning all this for a plan of attack, the crunch of pelting footsteps drew his attention back upslope. This time, he did not take cover.

Shortly, a boy a little younger than Adric burst out of the trees, ice crystals spraying everywhere as the fishing rod he was carrying clipped the bushes beside the path. The Doctor saw no signs of pursuit, and the lad seemed merely in a hurry, rather than terrified. He skidded on the soft ground and pulled up short, gaping.

“Good afternoon,” said the Doctor, coming forward with a smile. “I’m the Doctor. Can I be of any assistance?”

“’Ere, you, what are you doing out so close to frostfall?” The youngster eyed the visitor’s garb doubtfully. For his own part, he was wearing a quilted tunic and trousers like the padded undershirts of medieval armour. His squared-off backpack emitted a fishy odor. “Come on!”

“Lead the way,” the Doctor said. “I’m a visitor, you see. I didn’t realise how late it was, or how far I’d walked.”

“Right,” the child said, and started off again. Then he stopped, an idea occurring to him. “Who _are_ you?” he said, more belligerently. “Where did you come from?”

“A traveler from… beyond the ocean.” He would have said, “Beyond the mountains,” but he did not want to ally himself with what lay on the other side. It was beginning to look as if his mysterious contact’s story might be genuine. “I’m looking for someone. A very old friend, Nyssa. Have you heard of her?”

The boy stared. “You’re having me on,” he said sullenly. “You’d be sixty years old, at least.”

“Well, I am rather older than I look.”

The boy shrugged. “Come on. I was going to the Temple of Worthies, anyway. Dad won’t be so angry if I missed curfew hearing a sermon. Out on the mountain after frostfall is what’s death for fools.” Something about his tone of voice suggested that he suspected the Doctor was such a fool.

* * *

There was little breath for talking during their headlong downhill dash. They began to pass outbuildings, then people. Some of those they passed shouted or waved or shook their heads, smiling more with eyes than lips, since most were well-wrapped against the cold.A few stared in astonishment at the Doctor, and one or two looked like they had a mind to stop him.

“Temple,” the boy puffed to one of these. “I’m taking him to the temple.”

The woman nodded and let go of something concealed under her parka— a weapon, probably. “Matre will know what to do with ’un.”

They jogged on. With no immediate sign of his oldest enemies, the Doctor was beginning to enjoy himself. The run was warming his chilled limbs, and the clean alpine air was invigorating. If he was having trouble keeping his footing on the mountain-goat trail, he could just imagine its effect on a Dalek. They must have wasted a lot of energy in hover mode.

The boy was leading him down an ancient staircase made of living roots, over which rubber webbing provided grip for soles. The skilled blending of the landscape with synthetic materials spoke of a high degree of craftsmanship, sophistication, and above all, time. He wondered if he had somehow missed Mojox and come the the wrong planet. Just as the thought went through his mind, they passed a wide avenue extending across the river on a flat, seamless bridge that suggested Dalek manufacture, despite the roots, rime, and dirt that coated its surfaces.

At last they reached an imposing domed structure set into a hill. Its drum shape betrayed its Dalek origin, but the roots and and low trees encasing it had softened its contours. “Come on,” the boy said, leading him around to a side-door that opened with a faint creak. “Quiet, now. We’ll slip into a back pew.”

Inside, the large central chamber was warm and golden-red, redolent with the scent of torches and bodies and odors more usually associated with fishing ports. The Doctor’s guide set down his rod and pack with a number of similar parcels and coiled nets set around the wall. They were piled so as not to block the alcoves that circled most of the chamber. The walls were gleaming plasteel that reflected dancing torchlight. Each alcove contained a tall, polished wooden statue, human forms abstracted like the more organic styles of cubism.

The boy led him swiftly to an empty spot on one of the curved pews that filled most of the room, arranged in ranks like an orchestra pit. In place of the conductor stood a stooped old woman in quilted cloak and spectacles, addressing the half-empty audience from atop a polished, sawn-off trunk.

“…well may ye laugh, but it was no laughing matter then. Freeze-dried we were, far from the jumping rivers and the warm forests, banished to the desert wastes where even our metal overlords shivered in their tanks. No meat, no roots, no clean water, and the only fire was the poison that sits in the bones and kills slowly. Best we could hope for is to be transferred to the mines. Oh, those mines. I was straight-backed before I went in. But when I came out, the sky was ours again.”

“Praise the day,” came a soft chorus. Many of the listeners were engaged in small tasks, mending nets spread across their knees, or performing maintenance on more modern devices. The Doctor recognised the guts of a kinetic battery spread across an empty section of pew. A woman was sewing it into one of their quilted garments, whose inner lining was flecked with thermal filaments. While their elders worked, children played quietly in the aisles. The service felt more like an extended family gathered around a hearth for evening chores than a church sermon.

“So when labours grow tedious or the cold bites, remember ye well: you work for yourselves now, for the community and your children. Never again for soulless ones who steal and kill and give no thought to shaping tomorrow’s roots.” The old woman folded her hands. “That concludes today’s lesson.”

A girl in the front row helped her down from her plinth. Most of the people rose and filed out, bidding casual farewells to one another or clutching the old woman’s hands respectfully before departing. Those her age bore grievous but long-healed scars. The boy led the Doctor over to her as the crowd thinned.

“Jano,” she said, “I saw you sneak in, you scamp. Up above the weirs again, hunting for wild-caught? What will your parents say if you don’t come in some night?”

“I’m sorry, Matre,” he said. “But I found a stranger lost on the mountainside. He says he knows Nyssa, and I thought—”

Several heads turned.

“Don’t we all?” She clapped a hand on the Doctor’s shoulder. “Welcome, traveler. My hearth stands open. Jano, get you home. You did right to bring him. Give your parents my greeting.”

“And thank you,” the Doctor called after his guide, who was already retreating at a rapid clip.

Matre waited until most of the room had cleared, apart from a few people finishing small tasks by the light reflecting off the glassy dome. Then she propelled him swiftly towards the nearest alcove.

“Now,” she said in a sharper, less friendly voice. “Your name, stranger?”

“I’m the Doctor,” he said, putting his best smile forward. “How do you do?”

“Thought you might be.” Her eyes narrowed. “But there’s more than one body who calls himself such, if the stories be true. Which one are you?” She thrust a knobby finger upwards, directing his attention to the statue looming over them. “Do you remember _her_ title, when she served our masters?”

Thrusting his hands into his pockets, he gazed obediently up at the imposing figure. All the statues were much the same: colossal pillars with oval heads, schematic features, chins upraised slightly like the moai of Easter Island, and trunk-like bodies. This one’s proportions were less elongated than most, with a wider face but fine chin, arms held straight at the sides instead of folded, and a distinctive rectangular garment carved of pale wood. With a sinking feeling, the Doctor identified it as a representation of a lab coat. A cap of hair, fringed with curls like waving crescents, completed the minimalist portrait.

“It’s Nyssa, isn’t it?” It was too much like a funerary monument for his taste, and too aggrandising for hers. “On Terminus, she was a medical researcher, but I don’t know that she ever told me what her title was. Or if she did, I don’t remember.”

The old woman watched him with lips pressed together, waiting.

“You said… she served the Daleks?” It was a hateful question, inviting a whole string of distressing possibilities, but he had to know. “For how long?”

“Longer than we knew. Or she knew, for that matter. But I’m doing the asking. So, you don’t know what happened on Mojox?”

“I’m afraid not,” he said. “Nyssa and I barely escaped with our lives. She must have come here again later, after she stopped traveling with me. If I had realised—”

“Yes, yes.” She waved a hand impatiently. “Toru said that. Well. You _seem_ like the Doctor we were hoping for, at any rate.”

“I’m very sorry I could not oblige.” Sympathetic as he was, his patience was beginning to fray. _“How long?”_

“Her captivity, or ours?” the woman said drily.

“Both.”

“Five years and twenty, more or less.” She gave him another measuring look. “Toru told me once— it was almost Nyssa’s last words, he said— that ours, at least, was one planet you wouldn’t have to save.”

The statement was heartbreaking, but he was distracted by how it was framed. “ _Last_ words?” He stole a quick glance at the plaque below the statue. _Chief Virologist Nyssa_ read the legend, which did not improve his mood in the slightest. Nor did its subtitle, _NO SIN IS BEYOND REDEMPTION._

“So he said.” She clicked her tongue, apparently coming to a decision. “Very well. I’ll send word you’ve come. You can bide here tonight. Someone can run you up to him in the morning.” She waved a hand at the plaque. “Ignore that. It’s the official version. The Temple of Worthies only commemorates the dead.”

“Dead?” he said, voice rising dangerously as he followed the woman towards an inner door. A few heads turned among those still engaged in tasks in the main chamber. “Look, I’ve come a very long way, and if—”

Matre paused and waved off a man who had risen and started towards them at the sound of commotion.“Not here, Doctor,” she hissed.

Leading him into a hallway ribbed with characteristic Dalek arches, she sealed the door behind them before turning back to face him. “Toru’s got the keeping of what’s left of her. But that’s not widely known. As far as they’re concerned, she’s dead and burned. What do you think they’d do if they learned the alien scientist who brewed a pestilence to wipe us out might still be about somewhere? Not everyone believes in redemption!”

“A plague? Then it’s not Nyssa! She’s dedicated her life to curing epidemics, not causing them!”

“You might not recognise your own soul after the Daleks finished with you. So don’t claim to know anyone else’s.” Matre met his glare with her own. “I saw the files. Hundreds of people died in her experiments. Lingering deaths, Doctor, the kind you don’t forget. But in the end, she _did_ save us. Turned the pestilence against her own masters instead of us. Seeded the sky with it. They can’t come here now, we hope.”

The Doctor was staggered. He wanted to shout down every word of it. Yet he knew what the Daleks were capable of, what they might have done to Nyssa. _For five years._ The woes of this whole planet made the suffering of any one person a single scream among millions, but she was his friend. To be forced into enacting evils on a scale worthy of the Master: it was a fate worse than death for someone with her convictions. And she had already suffered enough losses to break almost anyone.

 _Chief Virologist Nyssa._ It was unthinkable. But could he really be sure she would die rather than submit? If she had had no choice— if she could only save Mojox by winning the Daleks’ trust— or if she had been brainwashed by some kind of mind-altering device, as she had once been on Florana, who knows what she might do? He almost hoped it _was_ brainwashing, although that episode on Florana had horrified her after the fact. But the release of a plague to destroy the Daleks suggested that she had been self-aware, by the end. And that, too, was not like Nyssa. However inhumane the Daleks were, he could not imagine her bringing herself to wipe out an entire population.

Had she hidden all this from him during their last journeys together? If so, it would forever haunt his memories of those times, both happy and tragic, not only because of what she had done (or had done to her), but because she was not quite the person he had believed her to be. Namely, for lack of a better term, a saint.

But there was no evidence. None whatsoever. He refused to alter his opinion of her one jot unless he saw incontrovertible proof. The mysterious Toru owed both him and Nyssa’s memory an explanation.

Matre gripped his arm before opening the door at the far end. “Now, keep you quiet. You’ll have all the answers you can stomach in the morning, but I won’t have you badgering my temple lodgers over dinner. And one more thing.”

“Yes?” He might be forgiven for sounding a trifle sharp.

“Tell Toru he’s a fool. The war will never be over, so long as he’s still clinging to old relics because they remind him of someone who’s gone. You tell him I said that.” She grinned humourlessly. “Again.”

* * *

“Well, now, isn’t this cosy?”said the Doctor.

In fact, it was nothing of the sort. The ATV’s cabin was snug but frigid. Heated wires within the window glaze were the only reason its passengers’ breaths were not freezing to the inside. Outside, sparkling in the vehicle’s headlamps, motes of ice crystals sifted down like fine sand. Frostfall was beautiful, but the danger was clear. All the sea-fog and moisture thawed by plants during the daytime was precipitating out of the atmosphere as the sun went down. It stuck to every surface, including the ATV’s exterior where the heat tape ended. Shivering, he wrapped his arms around himself and tucked his hands against his body, missing Matre’s hearth already.

“Thermal blanket under your seat,” Vanth said. “Boggles belief you’d come here wearing a smock.”

“Much obliged,” he said. He grabbed for his armrest as the cabin rocked sharply, banking as the ATV turned onto the bridge. “By the way, how do you keep from treading on pedestrians?”

Vanth ignored him, grinding gears as she thrust a lever forward.

The vehicle was one of those bipedal walkers commonly seen on frontier worlds where level surfaces were scarce. A bubble cabin hung between two stout legs, hoisted five metres aloft as soon as the craft was set in motion. Its splayed toes slapped the bridge’s metal plates as they crossed the river, then dug in with cleats as they pivoted right and stomped up the slope. Apart from one bundled-up figure, they passed nobody, leaving his question up in the air.

“I’m very much in your debt,” he tried again, leaning forward to fumble under the edge of his seat for the blanket. “I understand the Mojoxalli don’t normally travel after dark.”

“Toru expecting you.” Her voice was muffled by the thick shaggy collar covering most of her face.

“Indeed. Do you work for him, or…?”

“No. Construction work.”

He supposed her conversational skills had atrophied on evenings like this, when it ached to take in a lungful of air. “Ah, yes, of course. All-terrain and multi-purpose, depending on attachments.” He nodded to the sealed ports on the front of the vehicle, where mechanical arms or other tools could be attached. “And the Dalek technology explains the lack of creature comforts. So to speak.”

The vehicle lurched as she turned to level a furious glance at him, then looked back towards the growing darkness beyond the windscreen. He was afraid he had pushed her too far. No one at dinner had risen to his discreet inquiries, displaying the usual disinterest once a war had receded from living memory of the majority of the population. But this woman, whose leathery face looked to have lapped middle age and was now working on the next milestone, might have been born during the occupation.

It was some minutes before she spoke again. “They took everything. We’re entitled to take something back.”

“Of course. Forgive me.” So far, his numb fingers had encountered only a few oily rags and the rusty springs of his seat. “Speaking of comfort, I’m afraid I can’t seem to find that blanket you mentioned.” If he were human, he would already be in trouble.

“Further to your left,” she said, eyes fixed on the way ahead.

As the last lights of the settlement died away, and tree-branches began to crunch against the front and sides of the ATV, the Doctor found his mind circling back to that pointed conversation before the knees of Nyssa’s statue. Matre had avoided him all through dinner, attending to other way-guests. Now he wished he had pressed her harder about what was waiting for him on the mountain. Straining to reach, he nearly bumped his head against the door during the next abrupt jolt. “I’m not finding it,” he said.

“Try behind,” she said. “My mother was one of the last rebels killed, you know. By a Dalek agent. Toru raised me; he felt responsible. But _he_ wasn’t behind that ambush.”

“I’m sorry.” Her offhand manner pricked his suspicions. He began to scan the dashboard for any sign of environmental controls. “How much farther is Toru’s house?”

“Not far.” Her hands gave a sudden jerk to the left on the steering yoke. Something loomed out of the darkness. With a jarring bang, the windscreen directly in front of the Doctor’s face fractured in a spiderweb pattern. Only the heated wires embedded in the glass prevented it from spraying fragments into the cockpit.

Vanth turned to him, looking him over in the dim lighting. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” he lied. Speech through numbed lips was becoming difficult. What little warmth remained in the cab was seeping out rapidly through the cracks. “But we had better make for the closest shelter immediately. What happened?”

“Falling branch,” she said grimly. “Weight of the ice. Toru’s that way, a mile up.” She nodded ahead and slightly to the right, then drew down a pair of goggles that covered her exposed nose and cheeks. “Can you make it?”

“I’ll have to, won’t I?” It was a simple statement of fact. Whatever Toru’s intentions were, Vanth had telegraphed hers with that manoeuvre. The blow had not come from above, but from the left. She had steered into a tree. Wrapped head to toe in a thermally insulated boiler suit, she was not in any immediate danger. Whereas the Doctor was losing body heat rapidly. Having no other recourse left, he began to fall into a light trance to conserve energy.

“Just hold on, Doctor,” she urged. “Not much longer, now.”

As the machine stomped along, the edges of broken windscreen clicked and grated together disagreeably. The wind wafting through the cracks was so cold it burned.

“Funny thing about ice,” she said conversationally. “Snow, frost, sleet, rime, it doesn’t matter. Everyone says no two crystals are identical. But that’s not quite true. Deep down, at the molecular level, they’re all exactly the same. It’s in their DNA, so to speak, to behave in a certain way. Environment shaped them, but they can’t get away from who they really— _Dalek’s balls!_ ”

The Doctor opened his eyes a sliver. The windows were frosting over from the inside. Evidently the heat tape had been damaged by the collision. Struggling with the controls, Vanth stretched out a hand, trying to wipe the glass clear in front of her face. Their progress slowed. He began to feel warm and comfortable, which some part of his mind diagnosed as the onset of hypothermia.

She punched rapidly at a button on the dashboard, evidently without effect. “Come on,” she said, unhitching her harness and leaning forward to scrape at the window with the side of her glove. “Don’t do this to me!”

There was another hideous crash, far worse than the first. The ATV came to a violent halt. The driver did not. Vanth flew forward, met the unbroken side of the windscreen with a thump and collapsed, limply, across the controls. Rousing himself, the Doctor tried to push her out of the way and seize the steering yoke. Too late. The vehicle swayed, teetered, and fell. After a few giddy seconds of weightlessness, it crammed into the side of the mountain.

 _Now I know what the cricket ball feels like_ was the Doctor’s last coherent thought.


	2. Chapter 2

_You mustn’t die, Doctor…_

Nyssa’s voice. Déjà vu for a time yet to come. Leaden feet, numb and stumbling, scraping the frozen ground. Snow-laden branches hung with shrouds. A body’s dead weight dragging at his arms. A dry-leaf rattle, metal foil wrapped around shoulders like a chrysalis, an inadequate skin against the cold of space, the cold of time.

Darkness. No TARDIS awaiting him, just a direction, a beacon, a nod towards tomorrow. Human tomorrows, terrifyingly unidirectional.

Between living and dying, there were so many shades of grey.

He could no longer recall the colour of Nyssa’s eyes, young or old.

A man’s shout, possibly his own. Mechanical and human sounds, clank-soft, clank-soft, clank-soft. A leg that smelled of machine oil looming out of the darkness by his ear. He tried to roll away, but the body draped across his chest was too heavy. Someone was stooping over him.

“Take Vanth first,” he heard himself saying. “The psychopomp. She goes before. Underworld’s custodian—”

His body shut down.

* * *

Time was a blur of darkness, moving shadows, voices.

A woman he half-remembered: “I’m not leaving you alone with him!”

Another voice, the man from beyond: “He’s harmless, and you’ve done harm enough.”

 _Harmless would be an entirely inappropriate epitaph for this incarnation_ , he protested, and went on dreaming. Heated wet sponges pressed against his eyelids, his nose, between fingers and toes, but he could barely feel them. There were tree-roots all around him, warm and leathery like elephant skin, a comforting wall to lean against. Soft pith fibres grew under and around him. He was freezing, then burning, as the soft chrysalis failed to keep out the cold. His hands and feet throbbed with intense tingling pain that reminded him of regeneration.

Not _now,_ he told his limbs. _Be what you are. Regeneration’s a lot of bother, and I don’t have the time._

* * *

The Doctor sat up in a root cellar that was actually made of roots, or at least the walls and part of his bedframe were. The lighting came from natural phosphorescent panels, some in need of nutrients, to judge by their irregular grey blotches. The room’s decor was not very cheering: racks of clamps, test tubes and beakers, centrifuges, incubators, plate readers, wheeled tables, blocky computer terminals, a pair of gurneys, and what looked like an enzyme printer. Nor was his the only bed, although the two other bunks along the wall were empty.

The sight of the lab equipment brought him wide awake. But most of it lay under plastic sheeting. So he was not yet a guinea pig. Or was he? There was a sensor lead encircling his pillow. When he moved, an amber indicator began to blink on the wall over his head.

Hurriedly, he began to disentangle himself from a sandwich of blankets. He was encumbered by bandaged hands, still raw and painful as if the outer layers of skin had been scraped off and were in the process of regrowing. His swaddled feet were tender, too, although there the process seemed further along. He swung his legs around and winced when his heels touched the floor.

He had just spotted the room’s only door when a whine of Dalek hydraulics warned him that he was soon to have a visitor. Bracing himself for the worst, he crouched down behind a draped equipment rack and peered out. The door slid back to reveal a tall, gangly, but reassuringly humanoid figure. The light-panels in the ceiling brightened as the man entered.

The newcomer moved with the stiffness of age, or perhaps injury. He stepped out and looked towards the empty bed, frowning. “Doctor?” he said. “I mean you no harm. Please show yourself. I’m unarmed.”

The Doctor rose gingerly. “How do you do? The mysterious Toru, I presume.”

“Ah, Doctor, there you are. Yes.” The man limped over, right leg moving with a faint clank-slide, clank-slide. “Glad to see you up and about. I told the medics your physiology was different, but they assured me you were dead. How do you feel?”

“On the whole, I’ve had better days. The last time I felt this low, I’d lost an argument with a rather cantankerous spider.” The Doctor touched his swollen cheeks. “I haven’t… changed, have I?”

“Same face as when you came in, if that’s what you mean.” Toru pulled a chair out from under a table and slid it towards him as a sort of peace-offering. “Are you hungry? Thirsty? I’m afraid our hospitality has been rather lacking so far.”

“The accommodations are fine, thank you, but I strongly recommend using a different taxi service.”The Doctor took the chair and returned his host’s stare. Toru was old, nondescript, and somewhat shrunken inside the quilted tunic and trousers that seemed to be standard work clothes on this planet. Yet there was a suggestion of authority in his gaunt but erect frame. Salt-and-pepper fuzz clung to a brown scalp streaked with an old burn scar. A metal foot peeked from the hem of a trouser leg.

Toru smiled crookedly, pulling up another chair. “Not quite what you were expecting, I hope.”

“Not exactly, no.”

“Whereas you are.” There was an intense frankness about him that reminded the Doctor vaguely of Tegan with some of the points sanded down. “You could have left Vanth behind, you know.”

“No. Really I couldn’t.”

“Precisely. Which eliminates any doubt that you’re the real Doctor.”

“Oh? Was there some reason to doubt?” Before he could answer, the Doctor added, “How is Vanth, by the way?”

“Cracked head, cracked ribs, foul temper, but she’ll mend. She’s back in town, recuperating.” He met his guest’s eyes soberly. “I owe you an apology, Doctor. I had no idea my foster-daughter meant to keep you away from me. I should never have sent her to collect you.”

“Thank you. I was beginning to wonder why everyone I encountered here seemed prepared to exterminate me if I didn’t pass muster.” His phrasing was deliberate. Sure enough, he saw Toru tense at the word ‘exterminate.’ “However, this is all very much beside the point.” He straightened, whipping out the question like a knife. “Where’s Nyssa?”

“That’s a little difficult to expl—”

“Then show me.” The Doctor clenched a fist, although his half-healed fingers sang in protest. “I have come a very long way to find her, Toru, after you lured me here with an edited Dalek recording. Your temple custodian told me she’s dead. Or a monster. Or a vegetable. None of which I believe. In any case, you are going to take me directly to Nyssa, so I can see the truth for myself. At _once._ ”

“Doctor, I would like nothing better.” Toru met his eyes levelly. “But are you recovered enough to travel? We’ll have to fly— and walk. Her cryogenic pod is in a Dalek storage facility hidden in the mountains. I haven’t found a way to move it without disconnecting it.”

“Then we’d best get started.” The Doctor tested his footing and stood, wincing. “Your explanation will give us something to talk about on the way.” He gestured with exaggerated politeness. “After you.”

* * *

Submitting to Toru’s insistence that he dress in cold-weather gear, the Doctor was soon crammed into the pilot’s seat of an ancient two-person flyer. With a rueful smile, Toru had invited him to take the controls so that there would be no further mishaps. That might have been strategy as much as tact. It was difficult for the Doctor to ask too many probing questions while learning to fly an unfamiliar aircraft.

However, onboard navigation included an autopilot for preprogrammed destinations, and he soon mastered the controls needed for landing and takeoff. He eased down to skim the treetops. “So,” he said, “are all your vehicles Dalek manufacture?”

“Some. As a matter of fact, this is the transport Nyssa stole from their base when she went rogue.” There was a note of regret in Toru’s voice. “At my urging.”

One treetop thrusting above the rest caused him to pull up sharply, and there was a giddy moment of up-down, up-down before he eased back to level. These controls were too sensitive. “The Nyssa I know wouldn’t need anyone’s urging to defy the Daleks.”

“Doctor, I understand your doubts, but her memories of her former life were deeply submerged. They imprinted a new identity. She thought she was a bio weapons specialist. They kept her so busy, she seldom had time to think of anything else.”

“Chief Virologist Nyssa,” the Doctor recited glumly. She had a strong will, but he could not deceive himself. She would not have been able to hold out against Dalek conditioning forever. It had happened before, after all. He had never forgotten the blasphemous words grating in her throat: _Exterminate, exterminate_. “And you? What’s your connection with her? And just how did you come by that recording?”

“Years of covert research as a tech menial and data entry clerk. It took me six years to crack Dalek security archives, another year to uncover their secret files on the two of you. I studied your tactics for the resistance. Later, when intel reached me that Nyssa was on the verge of a breakthrough, I reached out to her. I gambled that the Daleks hadn’t removed her scientific curiosity. I was right. She was skeptical at first, but she was willing to consider my evidence. Once I showed her who she really was, she rebelled, recoded the virus to target Dalek DNA, and released it before they could stop her. The guerrilla war we had been fighting for years was won in a matter of hours.”

“That sounds like her, at least.” More than anything else he had heard so far on this wounded planet. Nyssa’s commitment to saving lives had sometimes surpassed even his own. Survivor’s guilt, he had diagnosed early on, and perhaps a sort of revenge of compassion, a response to the Master using her father’s body to unleash mass murder on the universe. If the Daleks had done something similar to her, forcing her to become what she abhorred, she must have been badly scarred by the experience. _Why had she not told him?_ But perhaps she had, every time she put her life in harm’s way, right down to her last selfless act. Even so…

Something still didn’t add up. “You said she was the final casualty of the war. Yet Vanth said her mother was one of the last to die.”

“Lieutenant Falex, yes,” Toru said. “It was after her party was ambushed that I contacted Nyssa as a last resort.” An electronic chime sounded. “We’ve arrived. Down there, Doctor.”

They had climbed above the treeline. There was nothing especially distinctive about the knob of rock nestled in a barren cirque on the mountainside. However, as they swooped close, the Doctor caught a flicker out of the corner of his eye, probably their reflection passing over ports or windows camouflaged to look like stone. It was not standard Dalek architecture, usually an eyesore devoid of subtlety. Perhaps it predated the invasion.

He touched the canopy release switch and swung his legs over the side, dropping out into a bleak wind he barely noticed. “So, here we are at last,” he said, helping Toru down and reflecting that neither of them would be able to outrun anything faster than a Melkor. “Lead on. I do hope it’s a better vintage than Amontillado.”

* * *

A few minutes later, they were out of the wind. The sense of walking blindly into a trap did not leave him as they trekked down a dark hallway. Toru stopped at the first door on the left, “Containment Store A,” and keyed in an access code. The chamber inside was vast, lit by dismal emergency lighting.

“This way,” Toru said, leading the way across the broken floor, stepping around the mangled remains of three or four Daleks. There were signs of a firefight or explosion. Walls, ceiling and floor were coated with traces of soot. Some overhead light panels were cracked or missing altogether. A sepulchral reek wafted from somewhere, so faint that the Doctor was not quite sure if it was organic or industrial. The visitors’ footsteps echoed loudly in that lonely chamber of death.

“I see there’s more than one cryostasis tube,” the Doctor said. Leaving Toru limping behind, he hurried towards the discoloured glass tubes set in alcoves around the walls. Sixteen, he counted, two destroyed, four open and empty. Of the remaining pods, perhaps a half-dozen had working status lights. “I’m very much looking forward to your explanation. Which one is hers?”

Toru moved without hesitation to the second functioning tube, placing a gnarled hand against the glass. “Here, Doctor.”

The Doctor hurried over. He started to reach for the keypad, its buttons half-melted by some past conflagration.

Toru caught his arm. “Wait.” The Doctor tensed. But all the old man said was, “If you open it now, you’ll kill her. There’s still traces of the virus in our atmosphere. A last layer of protection she left us, so that our enemies would leave us in peace.”

“Nyssa,” the Doctor said with icy emphasis, “is not a Dalek.”

He leaned close, wiping the glass with his sleeve. It was difficult to see through the black film carbonised onto the surface, and the tube was filled with a milky coolant. But it was enough. The ghostly grey form within the chamber was unmistakeable. Nyssa’s hair formed a shadowy backdrop framing a pale face which he had seen grow old, then young, then old once more.

“Hello, Nyssa,” he said quietly. “It’s… good to see you again.” It was a lie.

He rested his cheek against the glass, too numb to notice more frostbite. She was locked away in another universe, and yet she was here _,_ too, cut off from him by a mere six inches of glass and cryo fluid. He had to get her out. And to do that, he needed answers. Abruptly, he moved to the first tube that Toru had bypassed.

“Doctor—”

He cut the man off with clipped, mild tones barely masking his rage. “Tell me, Toru, who put her in here? You? The Daleks? And who or what else is trapped in here along with her?”

Again, the grime baked onto the glass made it difficult to make out anything within. He could feel his hand beginning to bleed inside its bandages as he scraped away the tacky residue. Squinting, he saw another grey figure that was a head taller, fair-haired, with a lean athletic build that he recognised all too well. The face was his own.

He whirled on the old man. “Toru, that’s me in there.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“A Dalek duplicate,” he said, the truth falling into place like a coffin-lid. “Of course. I should have guessed. You’ve lost some of them, have you? And now you need more? You dragged me all the way across time and space for a… a _cheap copy_ of a dear friend, which your own friends think ought to be destroyed! It’s a shell, a soulless perversion, a—”

“That clone, or rather one just like it, saved my entire planet!”

The Doctor fell silent. Peripherally, he noted his hands were stinging again, gripping the front of the man’s tunic.

More calmly, Toru said, “They scanned your minds, not only your bioprints. She _is_ Nyssa. With Dalek DNA, Dalek conditioning, Dalek memory suppression— but she is in there, Doctor. They needed her scientific mind intact.”

The Doctor released him and turned away. “How many, Toru?” he said tonelessly. “How many of them are there?”

“Three of her, four of you.” Toru exhaled. “I think. It’s difficult to tell which are truly dead, and which capsules are still operational.”

“You said… ‘our’ minds.” The Doctor gave his duplicate a sour glance. “You never mentioned anything about him.”

“I would’ve destroyed them, but they’re our only available test subjects,” Toru said. “Nyssa’s clone still had vestiges of her true self. Yours did not. Either they didn’t finish scanning you, or they had to jettison a great deal more of your engrams to ensure his loyalty. He was convincing enough to fool me, but Nyssa sensed something off about him, although she didn’t remember why. He was a Dalek, through and through.”

“Oh, no.” Fragments of the nightmare ride up the mountain suddenly made sense. “The Dalek agent that ambushed Vanth’s mother?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I see.” Circling back to Nyssa’s duplicate, the Doctor stumbled, the full weight of the past few days catching up with him again. He realised he was shaking with hunger and fatigue. He had risked his life and sent away his ship, agonising needlessly about Nyssa’s captivity and corruption at the hands of their old enemies. But she was not here, only poor facsimiles of her and of himself that the Daleks had used as weapons. It felt like a sick joke. He should have brought Turlough along to provide acerbic commentary. “I might quibble with her methods, but Vanth was right to obstruct what you’re doing. Toru, we can’t bring back the friends we’ve lost. Certainly not as Dalek hybrids. Who else might die at their hands?”

“I don’t know. I only know that this Nyssa was my friend, and she deserved a second chance at life.” Sighing, Toru set a hand on his shoulder. “Doctor, you’re exhausted. Come back to my hearth. Rest. We can decide how to proceed tomorrow.”

* * *

“It’s not bad, this.” Toru raised his mug and settled back in his chair before the fire. “Never thought I’d have the real Doctor in my house, drinking his fabled tea.” He chuckled. “Or, for that matter, having my own house.”

The Doctor grimaced at the unpleasant reminder that there were bootleg copies of him lying about. “I’m afraid it’s not real tea. It’s a bit of a job trying to convince your food processor to convert roots into Orange Pekoe.”

“Well, I appreciate the novelty, at any rate. My boy Sarul used to cook, but with the children grown and gone, I usually stick to preprogrammed recipes. Real food’s for the young. They don’t remember nutrient pills.”

The Doctor nodded, looking around at the circular room which filled most of the upper storey. Shelf-beds around the walls showed that Toru’s home had once been a communal one, but the cushions were now cluttered with bits of electronic equipment, spare parts and buckets of tools. Toru had regaled him over dinner with stories about his foster-children, the offspring of deceased comrades-in-arms. “Mojox has come a long way since I was last here.”

“Indeed. Occupation, liberation, the civil war, rebuilding— I’m trying to record it all before I die, now that I’ve retired from public life.” He smiled. “As I should have done long ago. The children have plans for the future; we only dreamed of being free.”

“Yes. You have to let them go.” The Doctor stared into the crinkling embers, tinted blue and green by the salts in dried kelp.

“As you let Nyssa go?”

“Not quite.” He took a cautious sip. The taste was acceptable, if only one could avoid comparing it to the real thing. “She wasn’t a child by the time she left. But she found a role elsewhere, built a life for herself, a career.”

Toru tilted his head. “Something tells me that’s not the end of the story.”

“No. But I prefer not to dwell on the past.”

“She’s… dead?”

The Doctor frowned. He ought to quelch this line of questioning: one couldn’t move forward if one was always looking over one’s shoulder, which he had been doing too often of late. And yet this man had some claim on him and upon Nyssa, thanks to the legacy they had inadvertently left behind. “We— I and two other companions— encountered her later in her timeline. She traveled with us again for a while. But I… I lost her. She stayed behind to seal a breach between this universe and another. She saved billions of lives, but I don’t know if she survived.”

“No!” Toru sounded genuinely distressed. “But you’re a Time Lord. Can’t you just—?”

“No, I can’t. Whatever happens, happened.” He finished the drink in one swallow, set down the mug and closed his eyes.“I should have guessed what she intended.”

“So that’s why.” There was a metallic creak as Toru leaned forward earnestly. “Doctor, you have my sincerest apologies. I regretted having to trouble you, informing you of these clones. But I assure you, I didn’t realise—”

“That the only Nyssa left in our universe is a twisted Dalek imitation? After I left her to die?”

“No. If it’s as you say, then she chose her own end.” Toru’s gruff voice softened. “But you’re wrong, Doctor. Thanks to misfortune, two universes could have the benefit of her care. Don’t squander it.”

“No, Toru. I won’t be a party to this.”

“But, Doctor—"

“You have absolutely no idea what you’re asking me to do!” the Doctor said, voice cracking as it rose to a near-shout. “Listen to me— no, don’t interrupt, because you’ve clearly learned nothing from that ambush. I’ve met Dalek duplicates. I’ve met regular humans programmed with Dalek implants. Both lived in torment, torn between their own personalities and Dalek control. They were like drowning victims, lashing out at those trying to save them. Two took their own lives. Have you any idea what a Nyssa duplicate would do, if she had Nyssa’s sensibilities and a Dalek’s impulse to kill?”

He shook his head. “But she wasn’t—”

“I’m sure she could find some cause worth dying for.” The Doctor struck his armrest and flinched. “I won’t allow that to happen. Not again.”

“And is that sufficient reason to kill her, Doctor?” Toru persisted. “Because that is precisely what you’re telling me to do.”

“I can’t answer that. But I can’t give her life, either.”He pushed away the footstool and stood abruptly.“And before you try again, I suggest you look up an ancient Earth book called _Frankenstein._ ” So saying, he headed for the basement.

* * *

He had intended to take a few hours’ rest, but sleep proved elusive. Eventually, the relentless grind of mental millwheels drove him out of bed.  He needed to occupy his mind with something, and quickly.

One of the bulky workstations proved to have power and, wonder of wonders, connectivity. The Doctor sifted through its cluttered memory banks until he found what he was looking for, squirrelled away in three levels of invisible partitions: the tools Toru had designed to break into the Daleks’ dataweb. They still worked. More importantly, some portions of the nearby base’s control centre appeared to be operational. So this was how Toru had accessed their communications relay.

Familiarising himself with the code to bypass Dalek sentinel subroutines took nearly an hour. He could not risk tripping an alarm and being shut out of the system. But at last, he was able to open a secure channel, camouflaging it with 5D encryption to ensure that it would look like static to any receiver besides the one he was targeting.

It took another twenty minutes for the TARDIS to reroute his incoming call to the hospital switchboard, and for a very bleary-eyed Turlough to appear on the ancient monitor. “Doctor. You’re all right!”

“More or less.”

“Have you any idea what time it is? And what about Nyssa?”

“She’s not here. Nor are the Daleks. They’ve been driven off by a synthetic virus she left for them.”

“Oh?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I can see that. What happened to your nose?”

The Doctor reached for his face. The outer layers of skin were still tender and swollen, but healing. “Frostbite. This planet’s at the outer edge of its solar system’s habitable zone. Now, I want you to—” He checked himself. Turlough would have to use the Fast Return Switch, which meant the TARDIS would return to its last landing point on the next mountain over. That clearing was several miles away, with a river dividing it from Toru’s house. He would have to wait until morning to have any hope of reaching it. “—bring the TARDIS here in about sixteen hours. Can you do that?”

Turlough yawned ferociously. “Assuming I can borrow antigrav crutches, yes.”

“Ah. How is your ankle feeling? If you would rather wait until—”

“No, Doctor, I won’t deprive you of the hospital’s special blend for another day. I know how much you enjoy it.”

“ _Turlough_ ,” he growled.

The young man began to laugh at his disgruntled expression.

“That’s not an effective test,” the Doctor said. “I’d scorn their poor excuse for tea even if the Daleks had lobotomised me.”

Turlough grinned. “I know it’s you. You go all chummy ‘Turlough-my-lad’ when something’s mucked with your head. And an impostor might have remembered to ask about my ankle. Anyway, if I have to eat hospital food, the least you can do is suffer in solidarity. Or, better still, rescue me with takeaway.” He yawned again. “Turlough out.” The grainy picture went dark.

An icon had been blinking on the corner of the screen while they were speaking. Now the Doctor examined the symbol more closely. It appeared that Toru had moved a stack of files into a directory on this workstation.

With a sense of foreboding, the Doctor clicked on the first item in the stack. Toru’s voice emerged from tinny speakers. _“Interesting. On a subconscious level you know something’s wrong, don’t you? I’ve given you no evidence – not yet at least – but you’re willing to hear me out.”_

The voice that followed was a ghost’s hand on the back of his neck. _“I’m a scientist, Toru. Scientists believe in hearing all the evidence before arriving at a conclusion.”_ It was Nyssa, right down to her haughty bravado in the face of an unknown threat.

Just that, and no more. But it was enough. Toru had a knack for getting around security locks in networks, and apparently he was equally skilled at bypassing people’s better judgment. The Doctor could no more ignore the provocation than Nyssa had. (But it was not she; he could not lose sight of that fact.) Knowing full well he was being manipulated, he clicked the next file.

It was footage from a Dalek security camera, the very one he had disabled when he and the real Nyssa made their escape. That scene — more poignant in hindsight — replayed before his eyes. They could so easily have died there, together. Transfixed by memory after the recording ended, he started as Nyssa’s voice spoke over the static that followed. “ _He’s nothing like the Doctor. He looks the same, but his manner, his smile… the way he tried to say sorry… he seems… nice._ ”

It was not Nyssa, and yet she sounded exactly the same. It seemed that she still had some latent attachment to him, but inverted, like everything else in this nightmare scenario. What had his duplicate done, that she would find his clumsy kindness so foreign? It was a disturbing question he did not care to pursue.

One by one, he clicked through the remaining files, unable to shake the spell of the clone’s voice even when he knew its familiarity was an illusion. The last file was labelled ominously: “Her Final Transmission.” With a numb sense of the inevitable, he listened to her confrontation with the killer who possessed his face but not his soul. “ _You’re not real. Neither of us are. They made copies of the originals five years ago, and we’re the result. A pair of fakes.”_ Her defiance was Nyssa’s, and her bitterness too: she had awoken to who she was and what she had been doing. _“Isn’t that what Daleks always do? One more death on my conscience. Whatever conscience a Dalek duplicate has.”_

He paused the playback and sat back heavily. There it was. He could no longer pretend that these clones were merely Dalek drones. Some, at least, had a conscience. She had proved it by doubting it. Of course, had she lived, she might have turned out like Stein or Lysette, unable to break free of their programming. She had not survived long enough to grapple with her Jekyll and Hyde nature. But was that sufficient reason to condemn her and her siblings to death?

Over the centuries, he had tried to save a great many people who were hardly paragons of virtue. Brewster, Stein, and the Terileptils were just a few recent examples. Some, like Turlough, had become good friends. Others, like Leela and the Brigadier, had committed deplorable acts of murder and violence, yet he had not renounced their friendship. Was it just for the Doctor to expect Nyssa’s clones to meet a higher standard of ethics, simply because the original had been so nearly a saint?

What would the real Nyssa have done, had Toru called her to Mojax instead of him? He knew the answer. The clones’ existence would distress her greatly. But if there was even a chance to save a life, Nyssa had always put her own comfort and safety aside to help.

She was irreplaceable. But these… these _people…_ did, perhaps, deserve someone to fight for them, even if they had been modelled, imperfectly, on a precious soul he missed.

The question was: did they even have a soul, and if so, whose?

* * *

Toru’s arrival the next morning barely registered on the Doctor’s awareness. His host halted at the foot of the lift and stared.

“You’ve been hard at work, I see,” Toru said, setting down a tray of not-quite-tea and boiled roots. He limped over to help the Doctor wrestle a large centrifuge out from the tangle of stacked clamps, glass tubes, racks, and other equipment that had been pushed against the walls for storage. The plastic sheeting had been cleared away, and some of the equipment had already been cleaned and laid out for use.

“I don’t suppose you have a pure sample of the virus ready at hand,” the Doctor said,

“No, but I do have its complete specifications and gene map, if that would be useful.”

“It would speed up the process, yes.”

“Very well.” Toru moved to the workstation. Bending over it, he said, “So, you couldn’t ignore her last wish either.”

“I didn’t hear it,” the Doctor said. He both dreaded and yearned to know what Toru meant by that. “Whatever your friend may have wished for, there’s nothing I can do to bring her back. The question is whether the others deserve the same benefit of doubt.”

“So what changed your mind?”

“Her conscience,” the Doctor said. “And I’m still not convinced this is the right thing to do. I just hope we don’t live to regret this.”

“Better that than to die full of regrets, eh, Doctor?”

It was not a question he cared to answer.

* * *

“Nothing, Turlough! There is absolutely nothing wrong! I’ve simply decided to stay on for a while.”

On the grainy screen, Turlough raised both eyebrows. “Somehow your tone does not inspire confidence. You’re not trying to keep the TARDIS out of somebody’s hands, are you?”

“No.” Although, considering who else was in cryo storage, it might be a wise precaution. “The Mojoxalli need my help in defusing some unpleasant surprises the Daleks left behind.”

“And you don’t want me to come?”

“Not unless you’re up for mountain climbing in subzero temperatures.”

“I’ll pass, thanks.” Turlough shook his head. “I don’t like the sound of this. If your friend Toru wanted to consult you for bomb disposal, why didn’t he say so in the first place, instead of spinning some phony yarn about Nyssa?”

“He feared the Daleks would intercept his broadcast and identify its source if he was too explicit,” said the Doctor. “In fact, we should sign off. I’m using Gallifreyan encryption at my end, but that only allows secure communications as far as the TARDIS.”

“Which is relaying every word to a hospital’s public switchboard. Wonderful.” Turlough smiled sourly. “All right. _Try_ not to get killed, will you? I don’t want to be stranded in the Empire of Polyfoam Cups.”

The Doctor terminated the transmission and hurried over to the enzyme printer to check its progress. Toru’s laboratory was a maddening hodgepodge of state-of-the-art and primitive equipment, some of it medical and some of it pressed into service from such unlikely technologies as engine parts and hydroponic feeders. The Doctor recognised certain components from his previous brushes with the Daleks. Others seemed to be custom-built devices cobbled together with varying levels of skill and ingenuity. In fact, many resembled his own lash-ups aboard the TARDIS. Which raised a number of unsettling questions about who, exactly, was responsible for them.

He needed to put those questions to his host sooner rather than later. Nevertheless, the Doctor was too engrossed in a comprehensive genetic scan he had uncovered among Toru’s medical files notice when the lift decanted not one but two visitors.

“Well, well,” said a dry female voice. “Seems you’re even more reckless than the madman of the mountain. At least Toru put his proposal before the Ten Elders before ignoring our counsel.”

Toru, leading Matre through the maze of scientific equipment to the Doctor’s main workbench, smiled apologetically. “I’ve been bringing Matre up to speed on your progress. What’s the latest?”

“Nyssa did her work too well. But thanks to your surprisingly thorough notes, I may have a plan B. I’d be even further along without all these interruptions.”

“Just as well,” Matre said, pulling up a stool beside him and settling with a grunt. “You spoke sense when you arrived, Doctor. So explain to me why you’re risking the safety of Mojox for these mannikins. Who granted you such powers of life and death?”

He paused the simulation and turned to her soberly. “It might surprise you to know that I share your reservations. But the fact is, choosing not to act is still a choice, or at least an abdication of responsibility. They’re here. Something must be done about them. Toru’s recordings give me hope that Nyssa’s clones retain most of her core personality, if not her memories. I intend to rouse one and see what she has to say for herself.”

“And if she proves a Dalek at heart?”

“Then I’ll remove her to an uninhabited planet and hope she takes up gardening.”

“Some hope.” She shook her head. “Very well. The Council isn’t going to like this, but I’ve no doubt you’ll do as you’ll do. I’d prefer not to use Vanth’s way to stop you. So just you be careful.”

“Brainwashed companions are an occupational hazard with which I have some experience. And now—”

“Doctor,” Toru said patiently. “Plan B?”

“Gene therapy. Rather than trying to counteract the virus, I restore the Trakenite genome to its natural state, removing Dalek DNA.”

“Then she will no longer be a Dalek,” Toru said, brightening.

“If only it were that simple,” the Doctor said. “But the body is just a shell. It’s the mind that matters.”

“The soul,” Matre corrected him.

“I defer theological questions to the experts,” he said irritably. “Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m rather busy.”

“Hmph.” She shook her head and rose. “Send word when it’s time.” The Doctor gave no further sign of hearing her until she paused before the lift and called over her shoulder, “You do understand that if you fail, we’ll have to kill her. And possibly you, if one of yours wakes up.”

“No pressure, eh?” he said lightly.

She snorted as the lift door closed behind her. The familiar whirr of the Dalek mechanism was an ominous coda.

Toru limped over to the workstation to peer over the Doctor’s shoulder. “She’s not happy, Doctor, but she won’t interfere. Vanth may be another matter. Can I assist?”

“Yes. There is one thing you can tell me.” The Doctor returned his attention to the simulation. “You said medicine on Mojox started almost from scratch after the occupation. Yet these experiments you’ve recorded are highly advanced, requiring a great deal of specialised knowledge. With respect, I don’t think you taught yourself genetic engineering by cribbing the Chief Virologist’s lab notes.” He scowled. “Some of which appear to postdate the Dalek occupation.”

“Yes.” Toru met his hard gaze frankly. “One of the clones I revived… lived a few months. It was winter, when I hoped the virus in the air might be dormant. I was able to transfer her back here under sterile conditions. This is her laboratory, Doctor.”

“Of course.” The Doctor passed a hand over his brow, vaguely aware of a dull ache. “Which explains why you have the complete Trakenite genome on file. So. How many other surprises are you keeping from me, Toru?”

“She and I worked on the problem together. That—” he nodded at the terminal— “is how far her research had progressed before… the sickness overtook her. I tried to isolate this room from the outside, as you see, but when the spring thaw came, it brought death on the air. She was so _close._ She told me so.”

Hearing the quiet agony in the man’s voice, the Doctor tempered his next question. “And what happened to the others?”

“One other, Doctor. I tried one more time, working from the partial cure she devised. That one died almost immediately, but not before attempting to kill me. Madness is one of the symptoms of the virus.” He looked away. “She was my friend, Doctor. I… abandoned research after that.”

“ _They_ were your friends,” the Doctor corrected sternly.

“If the second had lived long enough, Doctor, she would have become her own person. But when they open their eyes, they start from the exact same point in their lives. For that one moment, they are identical.”

“Like a branchpoint for alternate timelines,” the Doctor mused. Again, the quiet yearning in the old man’s voice made him uncomfortably aware of his own mixed motives for continuing this work. Toru’s guilt he understood all too well, but he was beginning to suspect something more. “Did you love her?”

The man broke into a strained grin. “Didn’t you, at least a little? You traveled with her, didn’t you?”

“Nyssa was a colleague, and a good friend,” he said stiffly.

“Of course, of course.” Toru let the statement dangle before continuing. “Well, I cannot answer that question any more than you can, and I knew her a shorter time.”

The Doctor turned back to the terminal. “Be a good chap and check on that enzyme synthesiser, would you? I’m afraid it’s stuck again.”

* * *

Everything was prepared. Even with the Nyssa-clone’s robust notes, it had taken the Doctor a week and a half to design and program a complex set of genetic substitutions to scrub out Dalek DNA and leave a healthy genome. The delivery system, at least, he could borrow from her own experiments. But he could test only so much in simulation. And there was absolutely no room for error.

A message had been duly dispatched down the mountain, and the priestess of the Temple of Worthies had wished them grudging luck. Now they stood once more in the sombre storehouse hidden on the mountainside. Toru waited tensely beside him with a robe and blankets while he made a final inspection of the cryogenic chamber they had chosen for their test subject.

“Stand ready,” the Doctor said. “But wait for me to deploy the serum. It’s going to be a race between the genetic catalyst fanning out through her blood, and the airborne virus entering her lungs. Every second will count.”

“Ready when you are, Doctor,” Toru said.

“Initiating revival process now.” He stepped over to the control console at the end of the row to set the process in motion, then hurried back. His gaze fixed on the blinking indicator light on the side of the tank. The milky substrate inside began to clear. There was a soft hiss of thermogas being pumped into the chamber.

“Two minutes,” the Doctor said. His hearts were beginning to hammer. Some part of his mind was still reacting to this as a nightmare, at once unsettling and yet so exhilarating that he had no wish to awaken.

“Doctor?” Toru said, lowering his voice.

“Yes?”

“Whatever happens, I’m deeply in your debt. It broke my heart to think of having to destroy these before I died.”

“Let’s just concentrate on the job at hand, shall we?” He glanced down at the injector he was holding. One minute. He removed the cap and waited. Time ticked down. Thirty seconds. Twenty. The fluid inside the tank was draining away. Ten. He readied himself to pounce as the seals popped and crackled. Five. Four. Three—

“Doctor!” Toru said, alarmed. “It’s not opening!”

Leaping into action, he capped the injector and shoved it into his pocket, grasped the edges of the lid and heaved. “Help me!” he panted. The cold bit into his hands. “It’s stuck!”

Toru flung down the blankets and joined him, adding feeble strength to the Doctor’s frantic efforts. At last the suction yielded. The curved lid slid around and behind the tank with a solid-sounding _chunk_. A puff of moist air and thermogen gas blasted their faces. They peered in. The clone’s body had sunk into the padded anterior, looking exposed and frail and far too much like a corpse. At least there was a pink flush to the cheeks. It was painful to see her, but he was too preoccupied to worry about that now.

The Doctor ripped off the sterile gloves he had just contaminated and drew out the injector again, uncapping it. There was no time to re-prep. He could see the shuddering rise and fall of the clone’s chest as she took her first breaths in forty-three years.

Grey eyes opened and fixed on him. “D-Doctor?” Her dazed, uncertain smile did not match the wariness in her tone.

“Nyssa,” he said, throat tightening around the name. There would be time for hard truths later. “It’s going to be all right, but I need you to be brave and hold quite still.” Even as he spoke, he leaned in, fingers gently probing her neck for the carotid.

She flinched and tried to pull away, but her movements were sluggish.

“Shh. Easy, easy.” He pressed the injector lightly against the fluttering pulse. A protein sealant followed the metagen packet in, instantly sealing the puncture before another heartbeat could put any pressure on the violated artery. “It’s the only way to save your life. I’m sorry, there wasn’t time to ask.”

Panic flooded her eyes. “What did you—?”

“There’s an airborne pathogen that could kill you. You were exposed the moment you left cryostasis. I had to counter it at once.” He released her shoulder and patted it. “Now you should make a full recovery.”

“Th-thanks.” She sounded unconvinced. Then something behind her gaze snapped into focus. “The pathogen. Yes, of course. But what business is that of yours, Doctor? And why was I in stasis? Where are the Daleks?”

He tensed. “That’s rather a long story, I’m afraid. Toru, blankets, if you please.”

The old man had retrieved his bundle and now leaned forward to drape a puffy thermal blanket around her, tucking it in at the sides with tender care. “Here we are. It’s good to see you again, Nyssa.”

“Chief Virologist Nyssa,” she said coolly. “And I cannot say the same. Why is _he_ here, Doctor? Have you betrayed us to the rebels?”

Groaning inwardly, the Doctor held out his hands. “I’ll explain everything, but we need to get you out of here. Please. _Trust me._ ”

Anger, uncertainty, and confusion knitted her forehead. But her lips spoke a different language, unless that raw, fleeting smile had been only his imagination. “You may be my friend, Doctor, but do you really think me so naive as to—” Her voice changed suddenly. “Duck!”

The Doctor’s reflexes were barely adequate, but he managed to pull her down and shield her head with the thermal blanket just in time. A blue bolt of plasma struck the top of the tank and exploded. Spatters of sizzling cryo fluid, sparks and bits of casing shot everywhere. He could feel searing splats of melted polymer striking his shoulders and bonding with the quilted fabric of his coat. Toru yelped in pain.

“Get away from there, old man!” Vanth’s voice boomed out across the chamber. “So, you’ve really done it. Move away from the tank, both of you. Doctor, you’ve saved my life, and I’d rather not take yours. But that Dalek abomination must die.”


End file.
